Transcript

So let's talk about a few cons of stunt coordinating. What are some of the things that are maybe not so attractive, at least in my mind, for being a stunt coordinator? Well, for one, I love being creative. And the reason why I wanted to become a stunt coordinator, which I'll talk about a little bit more in depth in a moment, is just my love for creativity and filmmaking.

So as concerns to being a stunt coordinator, you will be stuck in meetings constantly. There's going to be directors meetings, there's gonna be schedule meetings, there's going to be budget meetings and that have nothing to do with creativity and you're going to feel crushed. Sometimes you're going to be so busy doing these meetings and doing other administrative work that you're going to have to delegate a lot of your creative work to the rest of your team.

So being somebody that wants to be creative, having to delegate all that away is going to be one of the worst things that you're going to be feeling. As we were talking about egos, there's going to be many difficult people that you have to deal with, usually attached with the ego, the actors, the crew and other performers. One of the worst of them all can be actors and sometimes you need to attack this business as a father, as a babysitter, that you need to deal with tender personalities.

And sometimes if you're a person that doesn't want to take any society from anyone or doesn't want to deal with that kind of thing, you're going to find yourself in situations where you're going to have to if you want to be able to get through a situation. Another common is that you take all of the responsibility for the action.

Any stunt performer that doesn't give you what you need or give the production what it needs, any rigor. If an actor doesn't perform properly, you take all the responsibility and you have to take all the accountability as well. And if you're not up for standing up and assuming that and and accepting that, then you're going to find yourself in a difficult spot many times and you're going to be singled out and you're not going to know how to deal with that.

And the final scene right now that I want to talk about is that there's many days where you're just sitting around babysitting. Babysitting days sometimes can be the worst. There's many days where maybe an actor is going to needs to get in the car and drive away. Or maybe they have to walk down a street where there's cars driving past them right off the sidewalk and they want you to be there just to babysit them and make sure that everybody's safe.

When you have way better things to do, whether it's in life or if you have more important things to do, prepping for your upcoming action sequences on set. But the pros of the job are fantastic. So first of all, as a stunt coordinator, you can coordinate into your later years. I've been coordinating since my late twenties and I'm 53 right now and I still have another couple of decades to go.

Should I want it? Longer periods of employment. You're not day playing anymore. You're not taken weekly as dailies. You're usually on a show for the run of the show, which is most of the time. Three months to six months. And the money is great. The money is fantastic. There's no injuries. You don't have to worry about recovering and hitting the ground and dealing with bumps and bruises every single day.

Another pro is that you get to deal with problem solving skills every day. I'm a guy who likes puzzles. I'm a guy that likes figuring things out. So I get to run through my problem solving skills almost on a daily basis. And it just keeps your mind sharp. It keeps you engaged all the time, developing your people skills.

You get to figure out how to deal with different personalities. It's another problem solving skill how to best make yourself the most helpful that you can on the set and make yourself the best ally that you can, which is going to help you down the road in the future, which I'll explain later and the last thing that being a stunt coordinator does, the last pro of it is that since you're always on set, since you're always dealing with other department heads and other filmmakers, you are in turn learning your craft of being a better filmmaker all the time on a daily basis.

Other pros are that you get to made awesome people from all over the world. I'm often traveling over in Europe and other parts of the world, and I get to meet interesting and knowledgeable people and film all the time. You have a career that people dream of. You're working in the movies, you're working for Hollywood, you're making cool shit happen, you're creative and if you're the kind of person like me that likes to be in control, you get to be in control.